Knowledge of individual satisfaction is necessary for the success of any organization. For example, employee satisfaction has been linked with employee motivation, performance, initiative, creativity, and retention. Thus, systems for assessing employee satisfaction provide a forum for employees to express and compare concerns/appreciation as well as a means for management to monitor employee satisfaction, address areas for improvement, and compare employee satisfaction with industry-wide standards.
Systems and methods for monitoring individual satisfaction (for example, with a product, with an organization, etc.), including employee satisfaction in the workplace, are well known and widely practiced. A common method of receiving feedback from employees, patrons, clients, and/or customers of an organization is through the use of paper response forms. For example, comment cards are provided by an organization to its customers and/or employees to assess areas for improvement (i.e., services, products, environment, etc.). Unfortunately, the inconvenience to either the customer and/or the employee of filling out a response form have reduced the effectiveness and/or accuracy of the comments received. Further, employees are often reluctant to criticize features of the organization, lending to greater inaccuracies in response.
Other conventional surveys are disclosed in U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,615,134 and 6,026,387, in which computers are utilized to provide questions and gather answers to such questions. Unfortunately, employees and/or customers are less likely to participate in such electronic (or automated surveys) due to fears relating to confidentiality, difficulty of access, poor presentation of survey content, and/or inability to read ahead or scan the survey in its entirety prior to participation. Moreover, these patents describe evaluation models dependent on the question survey methods that lack a means for ascertaining the individual's sense of value for those questions provided.
In other instances, individual (or employee) satisfaction is evaluated by an outside consultant, which may require the consultant to travel to different geographical locations to assess a large operation with continuity. The consultant may also require the employee to stop productive work to allow time for the assessment review. It is time-consuming and often expensive for an independent consultant to conduct individual employee interviews, record the data, and assemble the information into a useful form. Furthermore, should a business wish to conduct periodic evaluations, there is no guarantee that the same consultant will be available. Therefore, the organization cannot be assured that the next independent assessment performed will have the same consistency. Nor is there any assurance that secondary evaluations will produce meaningful results comparable to previous exercises.
Even with valid data successfully obtained by independent consultants, a still further challenge is faced in presenting the results in a manner that is readily understood and that could be compared to other evaluations that have been performed. For example, the results of an evaluation survey conducted by one organization may not be comparable to the results of an evaluation conducted by a second organization, which may have a drastically different culture and mission from that of the first organization. Thus, there is a need for evaluation methods in which the value of the questions in the evaluation can be assessed so as to appropriately weight the responses.
Further, such evaluation surveys generally do not offer feedback regarding the results of the evaluation. Thus, participants in an evaluation feel disenfranchised from the process and will be more reluctant to expend the time and energy to provide constructive answers in an evaluation.
Accordingly, there is a need in the art for an evaluation system that is easily administered, that can be scored using a valuation system that is applicable to other evaluation methods that have been administered, and that can be accurately scored. Specifically, evaluation systems are needed that can generate satisfaction scores on a hierarchical level based on participant valuation.